‘Fringe’ Season 4 Episode 19 Preview: Welcome to the year 2036

In the future, a new Fringe team takes on an unexpected adversary as someone awakens after almost twenty years.

On this week's episode of "Fringe," the hunt for David Robert Jones (Jared Harris) is set aside for what may be the wildest episode of the season.

Longtime "Fringe" watchers may recall that the 19th episodes of seasons 2 and 3 brought the series to a new level of weirdness with partial musical and animated installments, respectively. This year, the 19th episode is "Letters of Transit," a story that takes place in the year 2036. And this is a world firmly under the control of The Observers, who no longer seem content to just watch humanity.

Of course, a major time jump for "Fringe" means that there's a new opening sequence! And sure enough, this week's opening sequence demonstrates how bleak the future is by listing the things that are now missing and considered "fringe" in this new era.

In the first preview clip, we get a glimpse at how tightly the Observers exert their influence and what they can do to anyone who gets in their way.

For the second preview clip, an elder Observer threatens to take control of "native" crime from an aged Phillip Broyles (Lance Reddick).

And finally, the third clip introduces us to this week's protagonists: FBI Agent Simon Foster (Henry Ian Cusick) and his partner, Etta (Georgina Haig); whom some fans have guessed may be related to Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv) and Peter Bishop (Joshua Jackson). And as the agents try to deal with the harsh future, they free the one man who may be able to help them: Dr. Walter Bishop (John Noble).